Table of Contents

Sr. No. Topic Page no.

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ABSTRACT

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 Abstract
One of the fastest growing areas in network security, and
certainly an area that generates much discussion is that of
ethical hacking. In todays context where the communication
techniques have brought the world together ;have also brought
into being anxiety for the system owners all over the globe. The
main reason behind this insecurity is Hacking-more specifi cally
cracking the computer systems. Thus the need of protecting the
systems from the nuisance of hacking generated by the hackers
is to promote the persons who will punch back the illegal
attacks on our computer systems, the Ethical Hackers. The main
purpose of this study is to reveal the brief idea of the ethical
hacking and its aff airs with the corporate security .The intent of
ethical hacking is to discover vulnerabilities from a hackers
viewpoint so systems can be better secured. Its part of an
overall information risk management program that allows for
ongoing security improvements. Ethical hacking can also ensure
that vendors claims about the security of their products are
legitimate. Ethical hacking is the process of analyzing the
imposed threat on a given system or network by modeling the
actions of an adversary.

This paper describes

ethical hackers: their skills, their attitudes, and how they go
about helping their customers fi nd and plug up security holes.
The ethical hacking process is explained in detail. Successful
ethical hackers possess a variety of skills. First and foremost,
they must be completely trustworthy. The ethical hacker often
holds the keys to the company ,"Modern security eff orts have
to plan for the unplanned and anticipate attacks before they
occur. Ethical Hacking is in the boom and its high time every
company recognizes the need of a potential professional ethical
hacker.

Ethical hacking is not just necessary ;it is

inevitable. This paper encloses the epigrammatic disclosure
about the Hacking and as well the detailed role of the ethical
hacking as the counter measure to cracking in accordance with
the corporate security as well as the individual refuge. This

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paper tries to develop the centralized idea of the ethical
hacking and all its aspects as a whole.

INTRODUCTION

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 INTRODUCTION

Today more and more softwares are developing and people are getting more and more
options in their present softwares. But many are not aware that they are being hacked
without their knowledge. One reaction to this state of affairs is a behavior termed Ethical
Hacking" which attempts to pro-actively increase security protection by identifying and
patching known security vulnerabilities on systems owned by other parties.

A good ethical hacker should know the methodology

chosen by the hacker like reconnaissance, host or target scanning, gaining access,
maintaining access and clearing tracks. For ethical hacking we should know about the various
tools and methods that can be used by a black hat hacker apart from the methodology used by
him.

From the point of view of the user one should know at

least some of these because some hackers make use of those who are not aware of the various
hacking methods to hack into a system. Also when thinking from the point of view of the
developer, he also should be aware of these since he should be able to close holes in his
software even with the usage of the various tools. With the advent of new tools the hackers
may make new tactics. But at least the software will be resistant to some of the tools.

Ethical hacking also known as penetration testing or white-hat

hacking, involves the same tools, tricks, and techniques that hackers use, but with one major
difference that Ethical hacking is legal. Ethical hacking is performed with the targets
permission. The intent of ethical hacking is to discover vulnerabilities from a hackers
viewpoint so systems can be better secured. Its part of an overall information risk
management program that allows for ongoing security improvements. Ethical hacking can
also ensure that vendors claims about the security of their products are legitimate.

Security:

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 Security is the condition of being protected against danger or loss. In the general
sense, security is a concept similar to safety. In the case of networks the security is also
calledthe information security. Information security means protecting information and
information systems from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, or
destruction

Need for Security:

Computer security is required because most organizations can be damaged by

hostile software or intruders. There may be several forms of damage which are obviously
interrelated which are produced by the intruders. These include:

lose of confidential data

Damage or destruction of data

Damage or destruction of computer system

Loss of reputation of a compay

Hacking

Eric Raymond, compiler of The New Hacker's Dictionary,

defines a hacker as a clever programmer. A "good hack" is a clever solution to a
programming problem and "hacking" is the act of doing it. Raymond lists five possible
characteristics that qualify one as a hacker, which we paraphrase here:

A person who enjoys learning details of a programming language or system

A person who enjoys actually doing the programming rather than just theorizing about it

A person capable of appreciating someone else's hacking

A person who picks up programming quickly

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 A person who is an expert at a particular programming language or system

Types of Hackers:

Hackers can be broadly classified on the basis of why they are hacking system or why they
are indulging hacking. There are mainly three types of hacker on this basis

Black-Hat Hacker

A black hat hackers or crackers are individuals with extraordinary computing skills,
resorting to malicious or destructive activities. That is black hat hackers use their knowledge
and skill for their own personal gains probably by hurting others.

White-Hat Hacker

White hat hackers are those individuals professing hacker skills and using them
for defensive purposes. This means that the white hat hackers use their knowledge and skill
for the good of others and for the common good.

Grey-Hat Hackers

These are individuals who work both offensively and defensively at various times. We cannot
predict their behaviour. Sometimes they use their skills for the common good while in some
other times he uses them for their personal gains.

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 Social
Engineering

Automated
Organizational Attacks
Attacks

Restricted
Data

Accidental Breaches in Security

Denial of
Viruses, Trojan Horses, Service (DoS)
and Worms

Different kinds of system attacks(fig 1.1)

General hacking(fig 1.2)

ETHICAL HACKING

n Ethical hacking defined as a methodology adopted by ethical hackers to discover

the vulnerabilities existing in information systems operating environments.

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 n With the growth of the Internet, computer security has become a major concern for
businesses and governments.
n In their search for a way to approach the problem, organizations came to realize that
one of the best ways to evaluate the intruder threat to their interests would be to have
independent computer security professionals attempt to break into their computer
systems.

What do an Ethical Hacker do?

An ethical hacker is a person doing ethical hacking that is he is a security personal who
tries to penetrate in to a network to find if there is some vulnerability in the system. An
ethical hacker will always have the permission toenter into the target network. An ethical
hacker will first think with a mindset of a hacker who tries to get in to the system.

He will first find out what an intruder can see or what others can see. Finding these
an ethical hacker will try to get into the system with that information in whatever method he
can. If he succeeds in penetrating into the system then he will report to the company with a
detailed report about the particular vulnerability exploiting which he got in to the system.
He may also sometimes make patches for that particular vulnerability or he may suggest
some methods to prevent the vulnerability.

Required Skills of an Ethical Hacker:

Microsoft: skills in operation, configuration and management.

Linux: knowledge of Linux/Unix; security setting, configuration, and
services.
Firewalls: configurations, and operation of intrusion detection
systems

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 Routers: knowledge of routers, routing protocols, and access control
lists
Mainframes
Network Protocols: TCP/IP; how they function and can be
manipulated.
Project Management: leading, planning, organizing, and controlling a
penetration testing team.

ETHICAL HACKING COMMANDMENTS:

Every ethical hacker must abide by a few basic commandments. If not, bad things can
happen. The commandments are as follows:

Working ethically:
The word ethical in this context can be defined as working with high professional
morals and principles. Everything you do as an ethical hacker must be aboveboard and
must support the companys goals. No hiddenagendas are allowed! Trustworthiness is the
ultimate tenet. The misuse of information is absolutely forbidden.

Respecting privacy:
Treat the information gathered with the utmost respect. All information you obtain
during your testing from Web-application log files to clear-text passwords must be
kept private. If you sense that someone should know theres a problem, consider sharing
that information with the appropriate manager.

Not crashing your systems:

One of the biggest mistakes hackers try to hack their own systems is
inadvertently crashing their systems. The main reason for this is poor planning. These
testers have not read the documentation or misunderstand the usage and power of the
security tools and techniques.

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Page 11
 EVOLUTION

HISTORY HIGHLIGHTS:

In one early ethical hack, the United States Air Force conducted a security evaluation of the
Multics operating systems for potential use as a two-level (secret/top secret) system. With
the growth of computer networking, and of the Internet in particular, computer and network
vulnerability studies began to appear outside of the military establishment. Most notable of
these was the work by Farmer and Venema, which was originally posted to Usenet in
December of 1993.

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 WORKING

Methodology of Hacking:

As described above there are mainly five steps in hacking like reconnaissance, scanning,
gaining access, maintaining access and clearing tracks. But it is not the end of the process.
The actual hacking will be a circular one. Once the hacker completed the five steps then the
hacker will start reconnaissance in that stage and the preceding stages to get in to the next
level. The various stages in the hacking methodology are

Reconnaissance

Scanning & Enumeration

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 Gaining access

Maintaining access

Clearing tracks

Reconnaissance:

The literal meaning of the word reconnaissance means a preliminary survey to gain
information. This is also known as foot-printing. This is the first stage in the methodology of
hacking. As given in the analogy, this is the stage in which the hacker collects information
about the company which the personal is going to hack. This is one of the pre-attacking
phases. Reconnaissance refers to the preparatory phase where an attacker learns about all of
the possible attack vectors that can be used in their plan.

Scanning & Enumeration:

Scanning is the second phase in the hacking methodology in which the

hacker tries to make a blue print of the target network. It is similar to a thief
going through your neighborhood and checking every door and window on each
house to seewhichones are open and which ones are locked. The blue print includes the ip
addresses of the target network which are live, the services which are running on those
systems and so on. Usually the services run on predetermined ports. There are different tools
used for scanning war dialing and pingers were used earlier but now a days both could be
detected easily and hence are not in much use. Modern port scanning uses TCP protocol to do
scanning and they could even detect the operating systems running on the particular hosts.

Enumeration:

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Enumeration is the ability of a hacker to convince some servers to give them information
that is vital to them to make an attack. By doing this the hacker aims to find what resources
and shares can be found in the system, what valid user account and user groups are there in
the network, what applications will be there etc. Hackers may use this also to find other hosts
in the entire network.

Gaining access:

This is the actual hacking phase in which the hacker gains access to the system. The
hacker will make use of all the information he collected in the pre-attacking phases. Usually
the main hindrance to gaining access to a system is the passwords. System hacking can be
considered as many steps. First the hacker will try to get in to the system. Once he gets in to
the system the next thing he wants will be to increase his privileges so that he can have more
control over the system. As a normal user the hacker may not be able to see the confidential
details or cannot upload or run the different hack tools for his own personal interest. Another
way to crack in to a system is by the attacks like man in the middle attack.

Password Cracking:
There are many methods for cracking the password and then get in to the
system. The simplest method is to guess the password. But this is a tedious work. But in
order to make this work easier there are many automated tools for password guessing like
legion. Legion actually has an inbuilt dictionary in it and the software will automatically.
That is the software itself generates the password using the dictionary and will check
the responses.

Techniques used in password cracking are:

Dictionary cracking

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 Brute force cracking
Hybrid cracking
Social engineering
Privilege escalation:
Privilege escalation is the process of raising the privileges once the hacker
gets in to the system. That is the hacker may get in as an ordinary user. And now he tries
to increase his privileges to that of an administrator who can do many things. There are
many types of tools available for this. There are some tools like getadmin attaches the
user to some kernel routine so that the services run by the user look like a system routine
rather than user initiated program. The privilege escalation process usually uses the
vulnerabilities present in the host operating system or the software. There are many tools
like hk.exe, metasploit etc. One such community of hackers is the metasploit.

Maintaining Access:

Now the hacker is inside the system by some means by password guessing or exploiting some
of its vulnerabilities. This means that he is now in a position to upload some files and
download some of them. The next aim will be to make an easier path to get in when he comes
the next time. This is analogous to making a small hidden door in the building so that he can
directly enter in to the building through the door easily. In the network scenario the hacker
will do it by uploading some softwares like Trojan horses, sniffers , key stroke loggers etc.

Clearing Tracks :

Now we come to the final step in the hacking. There is a saying that everybody knows a
good hacker but nobody knows a great hacker. This means that a good hacker can always
clear tracks or any record that they may be present in the network to prove that he was here.
Whenever a hacker downloads some file or installs some software, its log will be stored in
the server logs. So in order to erase those the hacker uses man tools. One such tool is
windows resource kits auditpol.exe. This is a command line tool with which the intruder can

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easily disable auditing. Another tool which eliminates any physical evidence is the evidence
eliminator. Sometimes apart from the server logs some other in formations may be stored
temporarily. The Evidence Eliminator deletes all such evidences.

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 APPLICATIONS

Ethical hacking tools

Ethical hackers utilize and have developed variety of tools to intrude into
different kinds of systems and to evaluate the security levels. The nature of
these tools differ widely. Here we describe some of the widely used tools in
ethical hacking.

Samspade:

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Samspade is a simple tool which provides us information about a particular
host. This tool is very much helpful in finding the addresses, phone numbers
etc

The above fig 2.1 represents the GUI of the samspade tool. In the text field in the top left
corner of the window we just need to put the address of the particular host. Then we can
find out various information available. The information given may be phone
numbers,contactnames, IP addresses, email ids, address range etc. We may think that
what is the benefit of getting the phone numbers, email ids, addresses etc.

But one of the best ways to get information about a company is to just pick up the phone
and ask the details. Thus we can get much information in just one click.

Email Tracker and Visual Route:

We often used to receive many spam messages in our mail box. We dont know
where it comes from. Email tracker is a software which helps us to find from which

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server does the mail actually came from. Every message we receive will have a header
associated with it. The email tracker uses this header information for find the location.

The above fig 2.2 shows the GUI of the email tracker software. One of
the options in the email tracker is to import the mail header. In this software we just need
to import the mails header to it. Then the software finds from which area that mail comes
from. That is we will get information like from which region does the message come
from like Asia pacific, Europe etc. To be more specific we can use another tool visual
route to pinpoint the actual location of the server. The option of connecting to visual route
is available in the email tracker. Visual route is a tool which displays the location a
particular server with the help of IP addresses. When we connect this with the email
tracker we can find theserver which actually sends the mail. We can use this for finding
the location of servers of targets also visually in a map

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The above fig 2.3 depicts the GUI of the visual route tool. The visual route GUI have a
world map drawn to it. The software will locate the position of the server in that world
map. It will also depict the path though which the message came to our system. This
software will actually provide us with information about the routers through which the
message or the path traced by the mail from the source to the Destination.

Some other important tools used are:

War Dialing
Pingers
Super Scan
Nmap etc

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Reporting:

Assess your results to see what you uncovered, assuming that the vulnerabilities havent
been made obvious before now. This is where knowledge counts. Evaluating the results and
correlating the specific vulnerabilities discovered is a skill that gets better with experience.
Youll end up knowing your systems as well as anyone else. This makes the evaluation
process much simpler moving forward. Submit a formal report to upper management or to
your customer, outlining your results

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ADVANTAGES

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 Advantages

Ethical hacking nowadays is the backbone of network security. Each day its relevance is
increasing, the major pros & cons of ethical hacking are given below:

Most of the benefits of ethical hacking are obvious, but many are overlooked. The benefits
range from simply preventing malicious hacking to preventing national security breaches.
The benefits include:

Advantages

To catch a thief you have to think like a thief

Helps in closing the open holes in the system network
Provides security to banking and financial establishments
Prevents website defacements
An evolving technique
Fighting against terrorism and national security breaches
Having a computer system that prevents malicious hackers from gaining access
Having adequate preventative measures in place to prevent security breaches

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DISADVANTAGES

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 Disadvantages

As with all types of activities which have a darker side, there will be dishonest people
presenting drawbacks. The possible drawbacks of ethical hacking include:

All depends upon the trustworthiness of the ethical hacker

Hiring professionals is expensive.
The ethical hacker using the knowledge they gain to do malicious hacking activities
Allowing the companys financial and banking details to be seen
The possibility that the ethical hacker will send and/or place malicious code, viruses,
malware and other destructive and harmful things on a computer system

Massive security breach

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FUTURE SCOPE

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Future enhancements

As it an evolving branch the scope of enhancement in technology is immense. No

ethical hacker can ensure the system security by using the same technique repeatedly.
He would have to improve, develop and explore new avenues repeatedly.
More enhanced softwares should be used for optimum protection. Tools used, need to
be updated regularly and more efficient ones need to be developed

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CONCLUSION

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 Conclusion

One of the main aims of the seminar is to make others understand that there are so many tools
through which a hacker can get in to a system. Lets check its various needs from various
perspectives.

Student

A student should understand that no software is made with zero Vulnerabilities. So while they
are studying they should study the various possibilities and should study how to prevent that
because they are the professionals of tomorrow.

Professionals

Professionals should understand that business is directly related to

Security. So they should make new software with vulnerabilities as less as possible. If they
are not aware of these then they wont be cautious enough in security matters.

In the preceding sections we saw the methodology of hacking, why should we aware of
hacking and some tools which a hacker may use. Now we can see what we can do against
hacking or to protect ourselves from hacking.

The first thing we should do is to keep ourselves updated about those softwares we and
using for official and reliable sources.

Educate the employees and the users against black hat hacking.

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 Use every possible security measures like Honey pots, Intrusion Detection Systems,
Firewalls etc.

Every time make our password strong by making it harder and longer to be cracked.

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